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IAEA to Discuss Israel's Nuclear Capabilities for the First Time Ever
31/08/2003
Palestine Media Center – (PMC)
Israel’s nuclear capabilities, considered the major threat in the Middle East, will be open to discussion for the first time at an international conference organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna on September 15-19.
Diplomatic sources said the IAEA has placed on the agenda of its 47th IAEA General Conference and Regular Session the subject of “Israeli Nuclear Capabilities and Threats.”
The sources said this is the first time in decades that the IAEA has placed Israel’s nuclear programs on the agenda of its general conference. They said the subject was placed at the behest of Arab and Islamic states.
The proposal to discuss Israel’s nuclear programs came specifically from the Arab League, the diplomats said.
Oman was said to have submitted the request.
Arab and Islamic countries have blamed both Washington and IAEA for having double standards by criticizing them and ignoring Israel’s nuclear programs.
The IAEA has reserved the conference to also discuss Iran’s nuclear program and US charges that Teheran is developing nuclear weapons. In response, Iran and Arab states have criticized the agency for failing to address Israel's nuclear arsenal.
In a recent meeting, the Arab League has asserted that Israel has stockpiled up to 300 nuclear warheads. The league said Israel now has the capability of producing hydrogen bombs.
The sources said the Arab League plans to distribute a study on Israel’s nuclear programs to participants at the IAEA conference.
The league will also demand that Israel sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Jewish state has two nuclear reactors one in the Negev desert and the other south of Tel Aviv but it does not acknowledge acquiring nuclear weapons.
International experts said that the Demona reactor in the Negev, which was established with French assistance in 1965, had produced 200 nuclear warheads at least.
Israel and the USA pledged in an agreement in 1969 not to discuss Israeli nuclear capabilities while the agreement obliged the Jewish State not to launch nuclear tests.
In return, Washington would not pressure Tel Aviv to join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that allowed the IAEA to inspect nuclear facilities of signatories.
“Israel’s Secret Weapon” was recently the title of a report by the BBC. A British BBC Correspondent team sought answers to four shocking questions, including the following two:
“Which country in the Middle East has undeclared nuclear weapons?”
“Which country . . . has undeclared biological and chemical capabilities . . . no outside inspections . . . jailed its nuclear whistleblower for 18 years?”
The whistleblower of the Israeli nuclear threat was Mordechai Vanunu, a former physicist at Dimona, the top-secret nuclear plant in Israel's Negev.
Sworn to secrecy, Vanunu received a warning after a minor breach, but decided to leave, taking with him the only known interior photographs of Israel's plutonium factory.
The pictures were offered to the London Sunday Times, his claims were substantiated and Vanunu was smuggled into the newspaper offices to tell his story.
When Vanunu's revelations were published in 1986, Mossad triggered a classic honey trap with an American woman Vanunu met in apparent innocence. She suggested it would be safer if he flew with her to Rome. He did, but Mossad was waiting; he was drugged, chained and taken by boat to Israel.
Sentenced to 18 years for treason and espionage, Vanunu was held in solitary confinement for 11 years and remains in jail.
The BBC program pinpointed where Israel assembles and stores the weapons of mass destruction that make it the world’s sixth strongest nuclear nation, told of nuclear submarines based in Haifa and how a Dutch investigation into a cargo plane crashed in Amsterdam revealed that Israel had been importing DNMP, a key component in the manufacture of biological weapons.
Was it tear gas, as claimed, or nerve gas as suspected that Israeli troops used on Palestinians in Gaza in February 2001?
“Is Dimona, 40-years-old, a safety risk?” was another serious question raised by the BBC.
Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister and the current opposition Labor party leader, who ordered Vanunu's capture, understands the exclusive protection gained by Israel in the "Treaty of Nuclear Ambiguity" ratified by every US president since Lyndon Johnson.
He recently elusively tried to hint that the whole story of Israeli nuclear capabilities might be “a lie.”
"If somebody wants to kill you and you use a deception to save your life, it's not immoral," Peres said.
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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